The Rahbani tradition — sometimes just called al-Rahbani, or 'the Rahbani school' — is the body of songs, operettas and stage musicals composed between roughly 1955 and 1990 by the brothers Assi Rahbani (1923-86, composer and violinist) and Mansour Rahbani (1925-2009, poet and lyricist) for the singer Fairuz (born Nouhad Wadie' Haddad, 1934, married to Assi in 1955). The style is unusually integrative: an Arab classical maqam framework (bayati, hijaz, rast, saba) sits inside orchestrations that draw on nineteenth-century Russian and Italian opera (Assi studied Rimsky-Korsakov and Verdi in detail); the lyrics move between classical Arabic (fusha), the Lebanese mountain dialect, and Andalusian muwashshah forms; the rhythms alternate baladi 8 and malfouf 2 with Western fox-trot 4. The output is delivered in three formats — 2-to-4-minute pop singles (Habbeytak Bissayf 1970, Aatini Al Nay 1971), 30-to-60-minute operettas (Petra 1977), and 2-to-3-hour full stage musicals (Ayyam Fakhr al-Din 1966). Fairuz sang almost all of it.

The brothers met the young singer Nouhad Haddad in the mid-1950s at Radio Levant in Beirut, gave her the stage name Fairuz ('turquoise'), and Assi married her in 1955. Their institutional home became the Baalbeck International Festival, which opened in 1957 at the Roman ruins of Baalbeck in the Bekaa Valley; from that year, the Rahbanis staged a new operetta or musical almost every summer. Alongside the stage works, they produced the bulk of Fairuz's studio and radio catalogue, distributed pan-Arab through the shared Arabic-language broadcasting infrastructure of the postwar era. In 1972, Assi suffered a stroke that limited his composing; from the mid-1970s, the couple's eldest son Ziad Rahbani (born 1956) began writing for his mother. Ziad's contributions — from Sa'alouni al-Nas (1973, written aged 17) through Bala Wala Shi (1979) to the album Kifak Inta (1991) — brought jazz harmony, Brechtian theatre techniques, and left-wing political satire into the tradition. The Lebanese Civil War (1975-90) coincided almost exactly with Fairuz's 19-year hiatus from live performance in Lebanon, a silence that itself became a symbol of pan-Lebanese unity. Assi died in 1986; Mansour continued composing until his death in 2009.

First, listen for the maqam-to-major/minor pivot. In Nassam Alayna al-Hawa (1971), the A section is in Bayati (an Arab maqam close to a Phrygian mode with a lowered second) and the B section slides into a nearby minor key with functional Western harmony. Second, the layered text: Mansour's lyrics routinely switch between formal Arabic and colloquial Lebanese within a single song, reaching different social strata of the Baalbeck audience simultaneously. Third, the difference between the Assi period (1955-86) and the Ziad period (1970s onward). Assi's orchestration is late-Romantic and lush; Ziad's, from Bala Wala Shi onward, is spare, jazz-inflected, and urban. Fourth, the concert vs. album version: a Baalbeck operetta runs three hours, but its songs also exist as 3-minute studio cuts. Hearing both reveals the Rahbani writing as three-tiered — song, scene, evening.

Start with Fairuz's Nassam Alayna al-Hawa (1971, composed by Assi Rahbani) — the textbook example of the Assi period. Then Li Beirut (1984), her post-war-hiatus elegy to Beirut, quotes Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez and became a pan-Arab monument. For the stage work, look for archive recordings and DVDs of the 1977 Petra and 1966 Ayyam Fakhr al-Din from Baalbeck. For the Ziad period: his own album Bala Wala Shi (1979) and the mother-son collaboration Kifak Inta (1991). Fairuz's best-of compilations are available through EMI Arabia and Voix de l'Orient.

'Fairuz' means 'turquoise' in Arabic. She has given almost no interviews across a career of more than sixty years and speaks minimally at concerts — the near-silence has become a kind of pan-Lebanese public persona. Second: her 19-year performance hiatus in Lebanon (1975-94) was a deliberate stance during the civil war. Her stated reason was that she refused to be identified with any of the war's factions; the silence itself functioned as a symbol of Lebanese unity. She resumed live performance with a 1994 concert at the reconstruction of downtown Beirut. She is still alive at 89 as of writing. Third: Ziad Rahbani, her son with Assi, has been an open leftist and Communist Party sympathiser since his teens and supported the leftist LNM during the civil war; his mother stayed strictly non-partisan. Their politics were opposite, but their musical collaboration continued unbroken — a rare case in twentieth-century music.